Internal Symmetries in Musical 12-Tone Rows
Anil Venkatesh
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Mathematics
Ferris State University
In music, a 12-tone row is any of the 12! possible orderings of notes in
the Western chromatic scale. The musical notes of a 12-tone composition
must always arise in the same order, cycling repeatedly through a
predetermined "row" of twelve notes. The repetitive structure of
12-tone music lends itself to mathematical study. In 2003, Hunter and
von Hippel investigated symmetry in 12-tone rows, using group theory to
enumerate equivalence classes of rows under a group of music-theoretic
symmetries. They found that highly symmetric rows constitute just 0.13%
of the 12! possibilities, and yet these rows arise in 10% of actual
compositions. This result provided strong evidence that composers favor
symmetric rows, but leaves us wondering about the remaining 90% of
compositions. In this talk, we introduce a way to measure the occurrence
of short repetitions and symmetries that go undetected in the analysis of
Hunter and von Hippel. We present a new hierarchy of symmetry for 12-tone
rows, and offer evidence that composers favor symmetric substructures
in their work.